Honesty vs Transparency: How Truthful are You?

According to Rubel this is a subject that comes up a lot with the folks she works with in couples therapy. By not sharing something you aren’t necessarily being dishonest, but the lack of transparency could lead to hurt feelings. She uses the classic example of two people who just started dating. One stops seeing other people immediately, while the other continues going on dates. “One partner might find it really dishonest to see multiple people at once, but the other may be operating more from an idea that no agreements have been made,” she says.

“That distinction between honesty and transparency, we kind of need a bridge for the fact that there are two individuals in a relationship. They remain two different people when they’re connected, so it just speaks to how we define these things for ourselves.”

Rubel completely disagrees with the idea that honesty and vulnerability are the same thing. If anything, she believes the opposite is true, and that honesty can be guarded, invulnerable, and unkind. “Honesty can be weaponized,” she says. “That could look like throwing a truth in a moment where it's not meant to share or open the conversation, but it's actually meant to shut down a conversation or to end connection.”

She uses the example of falling out of love. In one case a person could throw out the words, “I don’t actually love you anymore.” Or, instead of using brutal honesty, a person could be transparent and say something like, “I'm having a really hard time with our connection right now. Do you want to hear the thoughts going on in my head? Or not?”

If you’re the type of person who always needs to say what’s on your mind, remember that words matter. “Hold in mind that the awakened needs of all people are not always to have all the information,” Rubel says. “And that doesn’t have to be deceptive. It can be strategic in a really healthy, communicative way.”

She says to consider boundaries—both yours and the other person’s. “If we have boundaries that are paper thin, we let everything in and everything out, and we might be super connected, but we're not protected and we're probably not protecting other people,” she continues. “So honesty, as something positive means you have to know what your boundaries are. And you have to be familiar with healthy boundaries that are meant for you and the ones that you honour or respect for other people.”

If you want to share kindly with other people, Rubel reveals it’s important to be self-connected and confident in your ability to communicate what’s going on before bringing other people into those thoughts. It’s also important to understand what circumstances, people, and communities make you feel safe.

“People do want to understand themselves better, and they want to feel more peace around their interactions between themselves in the world,” she says. “But a lot of that gets muddled when we've had experiences that haven't been safe for us or for all of who we are. So we learn to compartmentalize, to shut down, to deceive, to tell partial truths.”

One person’s truth is never another person’s truth, which is important to remember when you’re having any kind of honest conversation in a relationship. Once you can accept that, Rubel feels you can use transparency and honesty to connect rather than stranding yourself on an island of truth, so to speak.

“Most of the time, a capital T truth doesn’t really exist. Our experiences are a more grey area than that,” she says, adding that things like privilege and trauma can shape a person’s truth as well. “It's always helpful to come from a more subjective and communicative stance around this concept of truth. That's where words like ‘honesty’ and ‘transparency’ and talking about the differences can be so helpful, because it allows these things to be nuanced and allows the boundaries to be moveable based on what to say.”

Rubel reveals that in the clinical work she does, someone who is attracted to their truth without really considering that someone else might have a different perspective or lens towards a situation is where discrimination and loneliness tend to happen.

“The things that leave us feeling secure in a black-and-white way of thinking are also the things that leave us feeling painfully on our own in this world,” she explains. “There is an internal danger of feeling very isolated with that truth if you're committed to it. And it's the danger of leaving other people feeling as though you're not open to considering how their experiences might shape them differently in this world, or leave them wearing a different lens, which is very alienating.”

Rubel says everyone is entitled to their own inner thoughts and feelings, which makes us all our own boundary keepers. But in order to have authentic connections with other people and to offer an authentic connection to somebody else, the need for transparency arises.

“We have to be transparent about things that might get in the way or influence someone’s ability to choose the connection they have with us,” she says. “I can keep everything private and that is my right. But I’m also not going to give anyone else the opportunity to determine, am I someone who they’re choosing to be in a relationship with, or friendship. We don't give the opportunity for informed consent when we completely close other people off.”

Remember the saying, you can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends? In a similar way you can set up the boundaries in your familial relationships as well—especially in terms of honesty.

“Some people are really comfortable compartmentalizing with their families,” says Rubel. She points out that not everyone necessarily shares their sexual experiences with their family members, for example. “It isn't necessarily considered dishonest to not share that, right? With any different community, whether it's family, a religious community, a school community and professional communities, we get to determine what those boundaries are, what we want to share and what we don't, knowing what the stakes are.”

In order to really dig into the idea of honesty versus transparency in a relationship, Rubel says it’s helpful to think in opposites. As in the opposite of honesty is lying, and the opposite of transparency would be something like opaqueness.

“Transparency and opaqueness and boundary, that's the thing that determines how much someone can see in or see out. Honesty and lying? There's a moral judgment attached to that,” she explains. “It’s important to bear in mind when we are assuming anyone has the same definition of these two terms as we do. For some, there might be a moral judgment and for some, there might not. That's the kicker, right? It's not whether people are defining them the same way. It's whether they're talking about them, and learning how each other defines them and staying curious about where the differences might be.”

No matter what kind of relationship you’re talking about, at the end of the day it’s all about learning to accept that people have different experiences, expectations, and perspectives on the truth and honesty. And the only way to effectively strengthen any bond is to remain transparent about what it all means to you.

“A really sustaining factor for any kind of relationship, romantic friendship, family, professional, all the ones that kind of define our interactions with people, is that we have to get comfortable with the grey area,” Rubel says. “Because we're working with people who are different than ourselves. And that is a great thing if we can match our communication to that fact.”